Saturday, April 02, 2016

There's a vicious rumor that AQ and LbNA are merging. Normally I don't comment on such obviously ridiculous rumors, but I keep being asked about it so I'm making it official--there is no merger! I don't even know how these crazy ideas even get started.

It does appear, however, that a hacker gained access to the Wassa Widget and changed it to only show the most interesting posts rather than the funniest posts of each day. This, of course, is unacceptable--AQ is nothing if not a ball of non-stop laughs--and the situation will be fixed as quickly as possible.

Speaking of which, Wassa has not lost his admin and moderator privileges. Obviously, the hacker was impersonating me when they contacted Wassa about his demotion.

Thanks for understanding in these dark and difficult times.....

But in all seriousness.... I'd also like to thank Choi for playing along with our little April Fools joke. I had the idea of "switching websites" for the day and tossed the idea to Choi, who was game for it. We didn't run with my original idea--mostly because neither of us are particularly experienced in the mysterious ways of DNS entries and can really screw things up badly if we didn't get it just right. Not to mention that it would have required a few minor (albeit "invasive") changes to the AQ code and probably some ugly security errors with a no longer properly functioning SSL certification. Perhaps LbNA had similar issues as well (I'm not familiar with the code or server to know what sort of changes might be required on that end of things). I still like the idea of seeing AQ show up in the address bar when someone types in "letterboxing.org" and have LbNA show up when someone types in "atlasquest.com", but it's probably a bad idea from a technical level....

Instead of that, we just redirected the first page hits to each other's website. Much much less technical and less risky thing to do. Although not easy enough, as it seems, since we'd been trying to fix problems with the prank pretty much the entire first half of the day. Stupid incorrect redirects and unexpected side-effects.... It didn't help that were in different time zones either. But hey, at least we got it right eventually. =)

I'd also like to thank Wassa for my favorite new phrase whenever I make a change or update to Atlas Quest--regardless of how stupid or ill-thought out the update might be: This is implemented for the good of the hobby.

And thanks to everyone who uses either (or both!) of these websites and was willing to put up with our shenanigans for the day! =)